because if you base either or both on your recollection of something occurring tomorrow or next week, youâre bound to screw up. Yet even that conclusion would be based on projected memory. One thing, though. If memory is unusable in the traditional way, the mania for daily slaughter might be reduced. We Irish would lose our grudges. Unthinkable. History could not be held responsible for repeating itself. As a bonus, we would not need to hear that droning quote from Santayana anymore.
Which brings me to that old bird Iâm passing at Eighty-sixth and Broadway right now. What if I only think of him as old because thatâs how he appears to me. My memory tells me that he is how an old man looks. He looks like me. But if my memory of such categorieshas not happened yet, then neither has he, and he cannot be old. Why, heâs a kid. A spring chicken. I donât look old to him, either. I, too, am a spring chicken. We cluck good morning to each other. There are two ways to look at people, I think. One way is as they are. One is as they will be. That old bird at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. Heâll be learning to sit up and crawl soon. Not long after that, heâll stand and walk. Good for him.
Which brings me to that girl Sarah, whom I have not met. Yet I have met her picture, snapped in the past. We are old friends who have yet to make each otherâs acquaintance. Sarah, do you recall what I started to say to you?
We have to rethink this whole business of time. Donât you agree, Buckeyes? I mean, since time does not exist and never has, we ought to reconsider the entire question. Remember two months from now? Maybe itâs language that confines us. We simply do not have the language to deal with the past in the future. We donât have the grammatical tense. If we did, we might say some remarkable things in our beautiful garbled new tongue. The language spoken in the worldâs not. And everyone would listen to our language, because it speaks the truth, and people would learn from it when they grow young again, and eventually are born. We must love the world. Is that not so, my Buckeyed friends? I refuse to budge from my trance.
IN THEIR TRANCE, the grown-ups sat in concentric circles in a field, the men in the inner circle, the women in the outer. Have I told you about this? We children were excluded, but were permitted to watch. What good these ancient harvest rituals were supposed to accomplish confused me, since the only crop I ever saw on Inishmaan was potatoes, and little enough of that, studding the land like the rocks. Still, the grown-ups prayed, like their Druid ancestors, year after year. They were more successful when they asked divine powers for fish, the invisible crop that seduced men to the ocean, where many died. Synge caught the repetitive sadness of the island fisherman in Riders to the Sea âthe relentless scraping of the curraghs on the pebbles, looking like the shells of mussels, but heavy. Four big men at a time hauling the boats to a place on the shore where the vessels could float. The men would climb aboard and wobble out, slowly out and slowly back, if ever they came back.
In their circle in the field, the men sat bobbing back and forth as if at sea themselves, like the davening of Jews of which I learned from Greenberg much later in Americaâbodies rocking, keening for the dead, and for their lives. The women surrounding them did the same. They wore hats of red and brown wool, and their great arms glistened in the moonlight that beamed behind the ribs of the clouds. They prayed in Irish, the lilt of the rhythms lifting up and down in the human circles, rising and falling like boats. At the top of a hill, a thick gray horse halfheartedly grazed.
Outside the two circles we children played like sprites and ghostly figures. We dressed up as animals, I donât remember why. It wasnât part of the ritual, Iâm pretty sure of that. Perhaps one child did
Which brings me to that old bird Iâm passing at Eighty-sixth and Broadway right now. What if I only think of him as old because thatâs how he appears to me. My memory tells me that he is how an old man looks. He looks like me. But if my memory of such categorieshas not happened yet, then neither has he, and he cannot be old. Why, heâs a kid. A spring chicken. I donât look old to him, either. I, too, am a spring chicken. We cluck good morning to each other. There are two ways to look at people, I think. One way is as they are. One is as they will be. That old bird at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. Heâll be learning to sit up and crawl soon. Not long after that, heâll stand and walk. Good for him.
Which brings me to that girl Sarah, whom I have not met. Yet I have met her picture, snapped in the past. We are old friends who have yet to make each otherâs acquaintance. Sarah, do you recall what I started to say to you?
We have to rethink this whole business of time. Donât you agree, Buckeyes? I mean, since time does not exist and never has, we ought to reconsider the entire question. Remember two months from now? Maybe itâs language that confines us. We simply do not have the language to deal with the past in the future. We donât have the grammatical tense. If we did, we might say some remarkable things in our beautiful garbled new tongue. The language spoken in the worldâs not. And everyone would listen to our language, because it speaks the truth, and people would learn from it when they grow young again, and eventually are born. We must love the world. Is that not so, my Buckeyed friends? I refuse to budge from my trance.
IN THEIR TRANCE, the grown-ups sat in concentric circles in a field, the men in the inner circle, the women in the outer. Have I told you about this? We children were excluded, but were permitted to watch. What good these ancient harvest rituals were supposed to accomplish confused me, since the only crop I ever saw on Inishmaan was potatoes, and little enough of that, studding the land like the rocks. Still, the grown-ups prayed, like their Druid ancestors, year after year. They were more successful when they asked divine powers for fish, the invisible crop that seduced men to the ocean, where many died. Synge caught the repetitive sadness of the island fisherman in Riders to the Sea âthe relentless scraping of the curraghs on the pebbles, looking like the shells of mussels, but heavy. Four big men at a time hauling the boats to a place on the shore where the vessels could float. The men would climb aboard and wobble out, slowly out and slowly back, if ever they came back.
In their circle in the field, the men sat bobbing back and forth as if at sea themselves, like the davening of Jews of which I learned from Greenberg much later in Americaâbodies rocking, keening for the dead, and for their lives. The women surrounding them did the same. They wore hats of red and brown wool, and their great arms glistened in the moonlight that beamed behind the ribs of the clouds. They prayed in Irish, the lilt of the rhythms lifting up and down in the human circles, rising and falling like boats. At the top of a hill, a thick gray horse halfheartedly grazed.
Outside the two circles we children played like sprites and ghostly figures. We dressed up as animals, I donât remember why. It wasnât part of the ritual, Iâm pretty sure of that. Perhaps one child did
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